Blockchain technology forks whenever the community can't come to consensus about where it should go. One coin becomes two coins. This makes the common person nervous about the space. With 1500+ coins out there, how can any of them be legitimate? This concept funnels into the idea that cryptocurrency is simply play-money generated "out of thin air". Most people fail to understand that all currency is generated out of thin air, and that cryptocurrency actually has superior rules over fiat. However, what if we could prove it with yet another feature of the blockchain?
MERGE!
We have yet to see two blockchains come together to form a single blockchain. It sounds very complicated and strange, but I maintain that this is possible and will be done in the future. Two similar chains will reach consensus and combine their communities. Such an action would increase the influence of everyone involved. In this space, cooperation trumps competition.
An action like this would show the world that thousands of chains are indeed justified. Forks can be thought of as a search for a superior product. Merges will occur when several of these superior forks are so similar that it would be much smarter to consolidate everything into one single chain. Blockchain is all about community consensus.
In truth, I think this concept is a long way from being utilized on cryptocurrencies. Why go out of your way to merge two coins when you can just let one of them die and the other one take over? I think that's the whole point though. Neither community will let their coin die. Crypto has low overhead and some of these projects have already been funded for a lifetime. Merging coins in the future may be the best way to increase the legitimacy of both communities. However, I think we have to assume that crypto will be mainstream before any developments like this come around.
Games
I bring up this topic, not because I want to forecast the future, but because this concept is relevant right now. I want to create games on the blockchain. I want them to be decentralized. I want to monetize that decentralization so that anyone can help develop the game and get paid for good work.
You can't force people to work together in a decentralized environment like you can in a centralized one. They have to come to consensus. Anytime that they don't come to consensus a fork will happen and a slightly different game will be created. This mirrors the exact same activity as cryptocurrencies.
However, unlike crypto, a decentralized game's development will occur much faster. A game could get forked 100 times much easier than a crypto could. Now you're left with 100 slightly different games. This is fine to start. The forks are searching for the perfect game mechanics. However, once those superior game mechanics are discovered it will be more important than ever to start merging branches and coming to consensus. It is in this way that one game could become 100 and then get merged back down to 2 or 3 different versions.
And I will call it: Diamond Development
Has a nice ring to it don't you think? The goal of diamond development is the process I just described. Ideally, it starts with an innovative decentralized idea that gets forked into oblivion, and it ends with the community coming to consensus as to which fork is the best one.
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